RFK + MLK = Barack ?
Could RFK + MLK = Barack? or maybe BaRacK?
I don’t know who first made the analogy between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy, but the analogy doesn’t work for me. Obama himself admits he isn’t old enough to remember John Kennedy, but I am, and Obama is no John Kennedy. However, after what I saw yesterday in Nebraska, I have concluded Obama isn’t less than JFK; I think he may be more. I think Obama may be the sum of two dreams, the Kennedy dream and the King dream and, more importantly, I think the Obama movement may finally be the movement that can unite multiple sets of dreamers.
I am suggesting, if I may be so bold, that Obama = RFK + MLK. Because after what I have seen in Nebraska this past week, I am reminded not of 1960, when I was only 12, but of 1968, when I turned 20. And since 1968, until last week, I had not seen or heard or felt or known the press of the crowd, the smiles and laughter that can only come from hope, the feeling of being in an enormous family of the human race, finally united with one voice, a voice of peace and of justice — I had not again been in the realm of a sense that “yes, the time is now,” since 1968, until last week.
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Being only 20 in 1968, I was not yet old enough to vote. But I was old enough to campaign, old enough to protest the war, old enough to work for civil rights, old enough to see men I knew go to Vietnam and come back crippled in body and, as we soon saw, even more crippled in mind and spirit.
I was old enough to have heard Martin Luther King speak at my college in 1967, the only time he ever appeared on stage with Black militant Stokely Carmichael. I hardly remember what either man said. But I can never erase from my mind the image of what I saw when I looked out my dorm window that night as I went to bed. Vanderbilt had been pressured not to allow the event to be held, but Chancellor Heard was a staunch defender of academic freedom and the First Amendment. In response, the city asked the governor to call out the National Guard, and the governor agreed.
As I recall, King and Carmichael spoke on a Tuesday when, being freshmen, we on Lupton 1300 had to be in at 11, because Vandy co-eds all had curfews in those years, every night of the week, and weeknights that was 11. But it didn’t matter. The city had imposed a curfew — something I had never in my life heard of. It was the spring of 1967. Check your civil rights time line if you don’t know what had been happening in the south in those years. We girls clustered in the rooms facing the street, watching in amazement as the tanks rolled one after another down the street in front of the dorm, on their way to camp for the night in Centenniel Park, ready for the riot the city feared was coming.
There was no riot. That spring 1967 night in Nashville was uneventful, and the next day the National Guardsmen all went home. The whole thing was quite strange. It’s impossible to forget it, and I haven’t. But a year later, in the spring of 1968, Martin Luther King was not in Nashville; he was in Memphis. Again the National Guard. But things went very differently. In the spring of 1968, we thought a dream had died.
The MLK dream was civil rights for all. The crowds, the chants, the cheers, the energy, the certainty that comes with moral authority — it could not be missed. Or it couldn’t be missed for those of us in the movement. But the civil rights movement couldn’t bring Black activists and white activists into unity, not consistently, and not nationwide. There were all kinds of reasons for the way it went, not all of them bad. Some of us college kids were part of that movement straight on through, some wandered in and out, but most people who were not themselves Black watched the civil rights movement on tv.
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In Spring 1968, before King was shot, I heard another giant speak on that same Vanderbilt stage: I heard Bobby Kennedy. We had waited hours for him. All the planes were grounded wherever he was coming from, so he was really really late getting to Nashville. The auditorium was packed. It was hot and humid and everyone was sweating, but we didn’t care. We were on fire with enthusiasm. My date pushed me into the aisle so Kennedy would be sure to shake my hand. Another memory I’ll never forget. A much better one than the tanks. But fast forward, I remember being at breakfast in the dorm just after we learned Martin Luther King was shot. Some Vanderbilt students cheered. It was 1968.
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But we still had Bobby. We still had Gene. We still could change things.
Then I remember waking up to my clock radio one morning after I’d gone home for the summer, to hear that Robert Kennedy had been shot in Los Angeles, minutes after celebrating having won the California primary. I felt numb. I couldn’t believe it. I kept changing stations, hoping it was a mistake. I ran to the kitchen to see the morning paper, to see if it was true. “Yes,” my mother said, “it’s really true.” I think she may have been crying.
Such a short time earlier that spring, girls on my floor at Vanderbilt had traveled to Iowa to work for either RFK or Gene McCarthy in the caucuses. The McCarthy and Kennedy campaigns were both fueled by, and gave fuel to, the movement to end the war in Vietnam. Despite the fact that MLK’s assassination came just after he had begun to link his movement for civil rights with Kennedy’s promise to end the war, to most Black activists, the peace movement remained a white thing. Black soldiers were dying daily in Vietnam, but their brothers at home had begun to question the draft. For King to threaten the endless supply of Black canon fodder posed a far bigger threat to the powers-that-be than anything he had ever proposed in civil rights. He had to be stopped. His movement had to be stopped before it branched out. Allowing integration was annoying, thought the power brokers, but ending the war was unthinkable.
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With another Kennedy dead, the Democratic party itself erupted in rioting that summer, making the Chicago convention of ‘68 synonymous with chaos even today. Though the peace movement continued to grow, it stayed a mostly white movement, and the Democratic party came apart at its seams. I was a Page at the Texas Democratic Convention that summer, because it was being held in Dallas, my hometown, where I was spending the summer. I joined the McCarthy delegates when they walked out of the convention after it refused to seat them, and we held a rump caucus in a nearby hotel. Excitedly I tried to talk about it at supper that night, like I always talked about my day. I had never seen my usually-gentle father become so angry. For the first time in my life I got up and left the table, dinner unfinished. I didn’t even understand what had happened, or what I had said. Apparently the anti-war movement was a taboo subject, at least in my father’s eyes.
In the fall of 1968 I turned 20, and by then I had already grieved the assassination of a hero three times since turning 15. Nixon took office, CointelPro began, every body in the country seemed to show up in the FBI files, and by 1971 the full-scale suppression of both the peace movement and the civil rights movement, along with the American Indian Movement, had begun. I had been, and continued to be, part of all three. But I was not the norm. For most people, any movement was one too many, and if they were in one, that was quite enough. The fire ignited by MLK and RFK, the one that almost got blazing with JFK and was kept alive in the domestic arena by LBK, that fire, even its sparks, became hard to see. They were there (and I write about some of the fire-builders elsewhere in this blog), but they were not all that hard to ignore, to look right past.
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Before 1963, only two assassinations from history had seemed important enough to keep in my mind: Abraham Lincoln and Archduke Ferdinand, whose assassination was the spark that set off World War I, according to my World History teacher. [But since he was also a coach and my Driver's Ed teacher, I was waiting for confirmation from another source to be sure that second one was important enough to put into long term memory.]
By the fall of 1968, I had experienced three more, all captured on newsreel forever. And how many times have we all seen each of those footages? Those of us who remember them from the day they happened, and those who know them only as history. The motorcade, the shots. The balcony; the shots. Bobby walking down the hall from the stage with a football player bodyguard, then the shot. And then the screams. Oh, the screams. As loud in despair as the screams of excitement and anticipation had so recently been when they were screams of hope.
A movement to end a war. A movement for racial and economic justice. Those were what Martin Luther King meant to bring together when he said in his last major speech, “You cannot have justice without peace, and you cannot have peace without justice.” But he never got the chance.
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Last week I heard Barack Obama speak to the thousands who had stood in line, in the cold, to hear him, and I heard him saying, “Yes! We can.” Then I watched the Will I Am video made with the words of Barack’s New Hampshire speech, and I heard the same words sung by different voices, from different faces, “Yes, we can!” And something happened to me. I believed it. I believed it. I BELIEVED IT! I felt the dream again as possible, and I saw that this time the dream itself is bigger than it was forty years ago. Bigger than it could have been.
Forty years ago, in 1968, there was a civil rights dream, and there was an anti-war dream, and the two sets of dreamers often felt they had to compete for the people’s ability to dream. But not this time. This time the faces in the crowd are of all ages, all races, male and female, rich and poor, educated and uneducated. This time, there is one dream. And Barack has shown it to America, against all odds.
Barack Obama is no John Kennedy. He is no Martin Luther King. But we learned in math that the whole can be more than the sum of its parts. In fact, the whole is, by definition, more than any one of its parts.
Barack Obama does not need to be another JFK. He does not need to be another MLK. Barack Obama is not less than either of them, he is not a reincarnation of either of them, because he is, in fact, their grandchild.
King and Kennedy are both Obama’s direct ancestors in his dream. Just as his Kansas mother and his Kenyan father gave him a dual racial heritage, John Kennedy and Martin Luther King have given Obama’s dream its own dual heritage. Finally our country is hearing preached the dream of peace with justice, justice that includes peace, and justice that includes everyone.
The crowd at Obama events includes everyone, and the dream includes everyone. At the beginning, I’m not sure Barack himself knew how big his dream needed to be. But the people he has touched have believed him into expanding his dream. In doing so, it has become no longer Barack’s dream, it is now America’s dream. And it is not a dream the crowds think Obama can bring about all by himself. No, the people know that it will take them too. And they believe, not just in Obama, but in themselves again. They believe, “Yes, we can!”
Barack is not another JFK. Barack is not another MLK.
Barack = RFK + MLK
The whole is much more than the sum of his parts.
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On November 22, 1963, I was 15, sitting in Math class, at Hillcrest High School in Dallas, Texas, when one of our classmates came into class late, dressed in a suit, and no one said a word. His parents were big Democratic contributors and they had been sitting in the convention center waiting for the motorcade to arrive and deliver the Governor of Texas and the President of the United States to speak at their luncheon.
I don’t actually remember what class I’d been in when the principal’s voice interrupted the day with the announcement that both Kennedy and Connally had been shot. But I remember my friend coming into class. I remember what seat he sat in — the 3rd or 4th one on the row closest to the door. I sat midway back, on a row closer to the windows. The class was hard; Algebra 3. I made a perfect score on the final exam, the first one that much-feared teacher had ever had to, grudgingly, give. It was probably my most famous moment in all my years of high school.
That class, that semester, that year — it’s embedded in detail in my long-term memory, because that was the class when our dream was killed, or so it seemed at the time.
We dreamed the dream again in 1968, and we let it slip away. Maybe this year is finally the dream’s year. Let’s hope it’s not too late. Remember, “Yes! We can.”
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